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What’s going to Happen If I Have to Draw My Gun?

Many citizens who carry a gun have perhaps never really considered what is going to happen once the fight goes to guns. The reason for this is simple statistics; the vast majority of attempted crimes are thwarted the moment the victim target presents a gun. In other words the criminal is psychologically defeated.

Here is the good news. The number of times this happens annually varies wildly depending on the source of the date from as low 830,000 to 2.5 million. Clearly the number is not going to be readily agreed upon since they are statistical inferences as in this type of gun use, more often than not the attempted crime goes unreported but the point I am making is simply this, someone comes after you with a lethal threat and you respond by pulling a gun on them somewhere between 92% to 98% of the bad guys are going to turn tail and run. So will you ever have to draw your gun? There is a good possibility of that happening. Will you ever have to shoot? You will most likely not have to shoot because bad guys are easily defeated psychologically.

So what’s going to happen if you have to shoot? It is pretty rare, approximately 72,000 times a year, but as in most cases it ends in one shot, hit or miss, the bad guy is once again psychologically defeated. Now we come to a dilemma because it is very hard to get the bad guys to tell us that they quit because they were being shot at or they quit because it hurt and they died. Statistically again it works out to about 2 times out of every 1000 attempted crimes that an armed victim fires his gun. If he did it right, that ended it, but for many who have been in a gunfight they will assert emphatically it is not Hollywood and even shooting the BG 20 times may not make him stop. So here is the $10,000 question . . . how many times do you have to shoot the bad guy (imagine a giant Samoan totally out of his mind on meth, strong drug crazed out lunatic) to get him to stop his threat. The clearly appropriate answer is you shoot until the threat is over, and hope you brought enough ammunition with you to guarantee you don’t run out.

Once you realize you are going to have to draw your gun what should you be doing simultaneously? Assume the Wild West Wyatt Earp OK Corral stance and start blazing away or . . . move quickly off the line while at the same time deliver accurate fire to the upper chest of your assailant? I hope you chose the latter and I hope your practice includes this because in the end, when the SHTF, what you have practiced over and over is what you will do.

If your typical practice session is to stand motionless in front of the target then draw quickly from your exposed holster and place two nice rounds in the targets chest, then that is what you will do in the real life confrontation. If your holster is not exposed when that happens you will quite likely be fumbling to get it clear of your garments so perhaps you should be practicing with a cover garment. If you stand motionless the bad guy is going to shoot you or at least run you over like a freight train so move immediately away, preferably diagonally away and get behind something, anything. Little cover is better than no cover. A moving target is far harder to hit than a stationary target and a target moving diagonally away is even harder to hit. When you have distance and cover you can place better rounds on target.

Accurate rounds placed fast on target while simultaneously creating distance as a moving target can save your life. There is an acceptable level of accuracy required to be effective, it is always going to be a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Neither happens by accident, you have to pick a percentage of hits you demand of yourself and keep shooting faster and faster until you can accomplish both, moving and shooting. If you do not have a place to practice as you need to, go find one, and use it regularly. Do not accept the corner public range where you cannot draw from a holster from concealment, where you cannot move and shoot rapid fire because what you are committing to memory at that public range is exactly what you will do in the violent encounter. If you have a problem finding a place, contact me through our website and I will help.

And for my revolver loving friends realize you do not have enough ammunition to stop a determined adversary, and if you have extra ammo and have not practiced reloading until it is permanently etched into memory you will have an empty gun and a deranged madman rushing wildly at you.

Yes I know, many will say their favorite .357 will blow the guys head clean off or completely destroy the BGs heart . . . well I have news for you, it won’t and even if you are lucky enough to put a couple of those rounds in the BGs heart he still has a few seconds to rip your head off while you are trying to figure out where that one speed loader is.

Carrying a gun is much like wearing a seatbelt. We never go out in the morning, get in the car and decide we will not have a wreck today and choose to not buckle up because we know there are crazy people out there on the highways. And just like the seatbelt, if we go out there with our favorite carry gun that we only practice range shooting with once every couple of months, well we may as well leave it at home as it will be ineffective in the face of the determined adversary. Yes the odds are in your favor, that the BG will hike up his skirt and run in fear when you present your gun but . . the odds of having a car wreck tomorrow are about the same, try driving to work without your seatbelt on, it’s about the equivalent in short-sightedness.